Class analysis and "authoritarianism"
Two ways of explaining Trump's recent H1-B visa fee yield vastly different insights.
In a move that sent shockwaves through international labor markets, the Trump administration announced on Friday new restrictions on the approval of H1-B visas. This has been a long time coming, so it shouldn’t have surprised anyone; as I wrote nearly a year ago, the nativist faction of the Trump coalition has been pushing for something like this since he took office.
What did surprise me, however, is the near total absence of class analysis of this move on the liberal-left. The headline-grabbing change, after all, is that Trump has raised the visa application fee fifty-fold to a whopping $100,000. Even at a surface level there are some obvious implications about economic access to immigration associated with that kind of price tag.
Instead, another critique has prevailed — spelled out here by Filipe Campante of Johns Hopkins University:
The H1-B visa thing is, like everything else in the Trump administration, set up to carve up exceptions for friends and punish enemies. It’s the authoritarian thru-line that stitches everything together.
So there are two ways to understand what has happened here — through class, and through something called “authoritarianism”. But which lens has more explanatory power?
The libertarian critique of authoritarianism
Campante, in his comments on the rule change, draws attention to two provisions highlighted in the excerpt below:
Section 1. Restriction on Entry. …entry into the United States of aliens as nonimmigrants to perform services…is restricted, except for those aliens whose petitions are accompanied or supplemented by a payment of $100,000 …[this] shall not apply to any individual alien…if the Secretary of Homeland Security determines…that the hiring of such aliens…does not pose a threat to the security or welfare of the United States.
Again, reading this my eyes immediately go to that $100,000 fee — but that isn’t really what Campante is taking aim at here. Instead, he’s interested in the fact that the Secretary of DHS has discretion to waive it. Thus the concern that the rule change is “set up to carve exceptions for friends and punish enemies.”
It is true, of course, that the Trump administration has consistently wielded power to the advantage of its political allies and the disadvantage of its foes. Its selective prosecution of immigrants for expressing left-wing politics or the way it has awarded allies like Elon Musk with lucrative government contracts are just two of the more obvious examples of this problem.
But there is an ambiguity here: is authoritarianism about a problem of exercising authority or of abusing authority? Consider Trump’s cronyism in awarding contracts. Ordinarily, liberalism has no problem with the idea that the government should have the authority to award contracts for various goods and services. In that case, what liberalism objects to is when that authority is wielded to partisan advantage; that is what is called authoritarianism.
Here, however, Campante isn’t actually objecting to any specific abuses that have taken place under the H1-B program. He is objecting to the potential for abuse that has been created by giving government officials any discretion in the process. In our contracting analogy, this would be the equivalent of calling it “authoritarian” not that the government abuses the contracting process, but that the government can negotiate contracts at all.
There is actually precedent for that kind of critique — but it’s not a leftist precedent. It is libertarianism that objects to government contracting on the grounds that the government should not be in a position to “pick winners and losers” at all. Pursuant to the principle that “the government that governs best governs least,” libertarians seek to eliminate any discretionary role that government officials have in governance. And a major part of their rhetoric, of course, has always been that any discretion that government officials have in exercising power is itself “authoritarian.”
For the right, the critique of authoritarianism has always been a critique of democracy. The right believes that people should not be able to come together, decide the kind of society they want to build, and then do so through the arm of a democratic government. Their rationalization is that it is better for people not to have any democratic power at all than to face the hard truth that all power, even democratic power, can always be abused.
It is tempting to construe this right-wing perspective as one that is only ever held by Republicans, but in the Trump era we can see how easily it drifts into the Democratic fold. Liberals are understandably frightened and disgusted by the terrible power Trump wields. Instead of interpreting this as a direct consequence of a democratic election that they lost, however, a growing number of Democrats have begun listening to the siren-song of libertarians: what if the problem here is not democracy, but instead that there is too much democracy? Sure, we can try to beat Trumpism at the ballot — but we can also try to beat him by constraining the ability of the government to do basic things like waive administrative fees.
And this is indeed a very basic thing. By my count there are currently at least 30 immigration fees that you can file a Form I-912 Request for Fee Waiver petition for. Hypothetically you could construe any one of these exceptions as facilitating creeping authoritarianism since it allows the government to decide who has to pay various immigration fees and who does not. But historically that has been a libertarian complaint. The liberal-left on the other hand have often fought hard for some of these exemptions, such as waivers on grounds of financial hardship or on the grounds of being a refugee.
In this case, it seems to me that the sensible left position would be to support the government’s authority to grant waivers for this fee while opposing any abuses the Trump administration might enact through this authority. But as I noted recently, a real strain of libertarian thought has infiltrated into liberal discourse, one which sees small government as the only possible solution to Trumpism.
A class analysis of Trump’s visa policy
In this light it is hard to find much use for the concept of “authoritarianism” in Trump’s H1-B visa policy. What Campante calls its “authoritarian thru-line” is really just a pretty banal waiver provision that is associated with all kinds of immigration fees, and it is hard to discover what makes this “authoritarian” without indulging in libertarian complaints about the government “picking winners and losers.” In this case at least, the main function of authoritarianism as a concept seems to be to obscure a right-wing critique and make it sound more appealing to liberals.
The class analysis of this policy, meanwhile, is less ambiguous. First, we already have evidence that Campante’s anxieties about cronyism are far too simplistic: today, the Trump administration floated the possibility of granting fee waivers to doctors. Insofar as this is a politically-driven decision at all, it is hard to attribute to cronyism: the medical services industry does not lean heavily Republican. If anything, Trump is granting the exemption in order to court an industry that has not been a reliable ally. But the more compelling explanation is just economic: Trump needs to grant an exemption because there is a significant doctor shortage in the US.
Generally, as noted, Trump’s restriction on H1-B visas represents a victory of his coalition’s nativist faction over its globalist faction. The populist right will spin this as a victory of “workers” who want higher wages over “globalist elites” who want cheap labor; more accurately, we should describe this as a victory of American workers (not the international working class) over transnational capital, and in particular Silicon Valley. Even more accurately, however, this should probably be understand as the victory of some Republicans donors like the Uihleins, the Scaife estate, and Mellon over others (like Thiel and Musk). It seems likely that Trump will grant selective exemptions to his Silicon Valley donors, but politically this is less an affirmative exercise in favoritism than the price he is paying to get the rule change past their opposition.
Whether this kind of economic nativism will continue to dominate the GOP in the long-term is unclear. On one hand, there will always be a significant voting constituency for it as American workers continue to blame immigration for their economic problems; and as long as there are also some rich donors who oppose immigration for unusual business or idiosyncratic racist reasons, nativists will continue to be a potent political force. Climate change may also strengthen the hand of nativists if climate migration begins to cause serious economic and civil instability.
On the other hand, however, both parties in the US still rely on transnational capital, which in the very long run will inevitably erode any barriers to trade and labor mobility that stand in its path. Contrary to the fantasies of the populist right, even a united front of domestic workers cannot withstand the forces of globalization forever. This is a problem of Trumpism that vague complaints about “authoritarianism” will never capture. In our world, even the most power-hungry dictators must ultimately bend the knee to the authority of international capital. Whether the GOP does so now or later, it is only a question of when.
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